Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for 30 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels. He is now International Business Editor in London. Subscribe to the City Briefing e-mail.

This time he has undercut the triumvirate – ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Junker, and Commission chief Jose Barroso – with an op-ed for the Financial Times excoriating their plans to head off another round of the debt crisis by giving real teeth to the eurozone’s €440bn bail-out fund.

He claimed that the latest EFSF proposals – which investors had already pocketed as a done deal – would amount to "eurobonds more or less through the back door".

They would "result in a weakening of the responsibility of financial market participants and member states, diminished incentives for sound fiscal policies, and again a shifting of risks to the taxpayers of other member states."

I have no doubt that Dr Weber genuinely believes what he wrote. He is a passionate, almost romantic, defender of the Bundesbank ideal. But he must also know that the judges of the Verfassungsgericht will weigh these words very carefully as they prepare to rule on the legality of the EU’s bail-out machinery.

He may have scuppered any chance of a deal to boost the fund at next month’s EU summit. The markets are not going to like that.

While I have been more hopeful about Spain lately – willing to accept that it is getting a grip on its twin deficits, and the cajas – a benign outcome in Spain is contingent on Germany doing what it has promised to do: defend EMU, against its own demons.

Specifically, he slammed proposals to cut the penal rate of interest rate charged on the rescue for Greece, Ireland, and any other supplicants. He called it a "danger", no less.

He slammed the idea of buying the bonds of debt-stricken states, saying "such purchases would run into significant operational governance problems regarding their volume, timing and conditions".

He opposed lending to states so that they can buy back their own debt at a discount (ie, a 'soft debt restructuring'), saying the plans "would not only be a very inefficient way of reducing the debt burden, requiring very large volumes to achieve a sizeable effect, but they would also constitute a transfer from other member states."

And he reminded market naifs that these policies might backfire as "the risks of the remaining private bondholders would increase sharply, thereby significantly heightening the pressure to sell."

May I hold your coats, gentlemen?

Messrs Trichet, Juncker, and Barroso are entirely correct – from their own standpoint – in calling for a much more powerful rescue fund. Given the circumstances in which EMU now finds itself after years of structural North-South divergence, Germany no longer has the POLITICAL luxury of sticking to Bundesbank orthodoxy.

If Germany insists – as the FDP and the CSU demands, and Angela Merkel seems inclined to do for now – it more or less ensures that monetary union drifts from one crisis to another, at constant risk of disaster. It invites very lively bond action in March.

My view has always been that Germany did not understand what its signed up to at Maastricht (nor did any other country), and is now in a position where it has to choose between a Transferunion and letting EMU die.

By Transferunion, I mean full fiscal union: handing power to set taxes, draw up budgets, etc, to an EU government, which can outvote Germany, just as Dr Weber been outvoted by the majority on the ECB council. This means the end of Germany as a self-governing sovereign nation.

That is what the euro always meant, and why I have always viewed the Project as the malign – chiefly, but not only, because any such European government created to back up EMU would lack a democratic counterweight rooted in legitimacy, and would be inherently authoritarian. Might the European Parliament become such a counterwieght? No, it has no single language, and responds to no unified politcal debate. It is fragmented, a plaything of the EU executive.

Needless to say, the political class as a whole has never faced up to implications of EMU. Events are now forcing them to face up.

Dr Weber understands the Morton’s Fork perfectly. It is clear to me which outcome he prefers, but I hope he recognizes how messy this could be.
To those readers of yesterday’s blog who insist that Mrs Merkel’s crushing defeat in Hamburg was purely due to local issues, I can only say that is a matter of conjecture since none of us actually know.

Merkel’s CDU is looking battered across the country, even in her bastions such as Baden-Württemberg. Something bigger is clearly afoot, as is usually the case in these regional elections.

To what degree irritation over serial bail-outs and rising inflation is playing a part is an open question. Anybody who covers elections – and I covered a great number as a foreign correspondent for 20 years, especially 'No' votes against further EU integration – learns that voters rarely articulate the actual reason for their decision. You have to tickle it out.

And now back to Libya, which I watch with close interest since my father wrote a book about the country, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. He worked closely with the Sanusi leader Idris (later king) in 1941-1943, and played a role in helping to create what later became the independent state of Libya.

He would have been heartened to see the old flag flying once again in Benghazi, but saddened that so much went wrong.